"Hear that?"
I listened and didn't know what he meant.
"It's the HVAC system. It makes nine distinct annoying sounds."
The guy scored 100% on the Listener scale of the Kairos Assessment, Mine's around 40%. The heating and cooling system in his modern office building was maddeningly distracting for him.
I had to take his word for it.
How we process auditory information cognitively is separate from what's measured in a hearing test. He and I could go to an audiologist and possibly come away with a report that we had identified the same sounds to the same level of pitch or volume, and still sit in the waiting room or go out in the street and be aware of completely different sounds.
In the audiologist test, the sounds bounced our eardrums and rattled our cochlear bones the same way, but once those data traveled into our brains, we can receive them remarkably differently. A small group I was meeting in their office conference room unintentionally ran a small experiment in this. They had a mini refrigerator in the room. During our session, it cycled on and off. Two of the participants were distracted by it. Most of the others were aware of it, but easily ignored it. A couple of us were, 'What refrigerator?"
I'm highly activated by human-generated sounds. I have almost no awareness for machine-made sound. If I'm concentrating on writing this post, or in a conversation with you, I won't hear the tea kettle whistling. You might, and please call my attention to it. The wife of one of my colleagues by contrast, approaches the awareness of our fellow distracted nine different ways by his ventilation system. If my colleague wants to munch potato chips, best if he goes outside and a half a block away to start crunching.
There's another odd twist to this. Some of us are alert to certain kinds of sounds, and at the same time, not distracted by them. As noted, I'm alert to human speech, at the same time, I prefer to work in an environment with the buzz of human speech and activity around me. If I'm working alone and at home, I'll put a podcast on in the background, not necessarily in the same room, and I won't necessarily take in the content. Humans talking in the background calm me and raise my energy. Have at it with those potato chips, I won't notice.
Some of you are similarly calmed and focused by background music. This also has an interesting split. Some of you only experience this from instrumental music and are distracted by vocal music. Others not. One of my associates, Luis Rivera, put me on to research on our cognitive response to rhythm and beat: Why Does House Music Feel So Damn Good.
Here's a hard one. A few of us get fatigued by human speech. We love you. We're interested in you. At the same time, your long stories tire us out. We lose attention. We stop taking it in. It's not that we don't care. Our capacity to take in the spoken word is limited. Please accept flowers and a nice note.
By now, you can see the sources of conflict in our relationships. These different levels of awareness are inherent. They're not signs of bad character. There are adaptations we can make. Awareness of what catches our attention; what misses our attention; what raises our energy; what depletes our energy can reduce frustration and disappointment.
My colleague, Robert, sent me a short clip of a Jerry Seinfeld interview. He was talking about child rearing, but he makes a point about the human condition. He exhorts us to stay within "the bracket of struggle."
The diversity of our cognitive awarenesses creates a struggle in our engagements with each other. I get energy when I embrace it.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
Luis Rivera: https://www.wscff.org/wp-content/uploads/B16-Ready-Rebound-WSCFF-Conference.pdf
Why Does House Music Feel So Damn Good: https://the-gist.org/2018/10/why-does-house-music-feel-so-damn-good/